Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

340 THE CRANES OF CULTURE The Monkey's Uncle Meets the Meme 341
is sleeping, well, that's just the chance that trees have to take, all the time.
But surely we animals are at greater risk from predators while we sleep? Not
necessarily. Leaving the den is risky, too, and if we're going to minimize that
risky phase, we might as well keep the metabolism idling while we bide our
time, conserving energy for the main business of replicating. (These matters
are much more complicated than I am portraying them, of course. My point
is just that the cost-benefit analysis is far from obvious, and that is enough to
remove the air of paradox.)
We think that being up and about, having adventures and completing
projects, seeing our friends and learning about the world, is the whole point
of life, but Mother Nature doesn't see it that way at all. A life of sleep is as
good a life as any other, and in many regards better—certainly cheaper—
than most. If the members of some other species also seem to enjoy their
periods of wakefulness as much as we do, this is an interesting commonality,
so interesting that we should not make the mistake of assuming it must exist
just because we find it to be such an appropriate attitude towards life in our
own case. Its existence in other species needs to be shown, and that is not
easy. 1
What we are is very much a matter of what culture has made us. Now we
must ask how this all got started. What sort of evolutionary revolution
happened that set us apart so decisively from all the other products of genetic
revolution? The story I am going to tell is a retelling of the story we
encountered in chapter 4, about the creation of the eukaryotic cells that made
multicellular life possible. You will recall that before there were cells with
nuclei there were simpler, and more solitary, life forms, the prokary-otes,
destined for nothing fancier than drifting around in an energy-rich soup
reproducing themselves. Not nothing, but not much of a life. Then, one day,
according to Lynn Margulis' wonderful story (1981), some prokaryotes were
invaded by parasites of sorts, and this turned out to be a blessing in disguise,
for, whereas parasites are—by definition—deleterious to the fitness of their
hosts, these invaders turned out to be beneficial, and hence were symbionts
but not parasites. They and those they invaded became more like
commensals—literally, from the Latin, organisms that feed at the same
table—or mutualists, benefiting from each other's company. They joined
forces, creating a revolutionary new kind of entity, a eukaryotic cell. This
opened up the Vast space of possibilities we know as multicellular life, a
space previously unimaginable, to say the least; prokaryotes are no doubt
clueless on all topics.
1. See the discussion of fun in Dennett 1991a. Some human beings claim to love to sleep.
"What do you plan to do this weekend?" "Sleep! Ahh, it will be wonderful!" Other human
beings find this attitude well-nigh incomprehensible. Mother Nature sees nothing strange
about either attitude, under the right conditions.
Then a few billion years passed, while multicellular life forms explored
various nooks and crannies of Design Space until, one fine day, another
invasion began, in a single species of multicellular organism, a sort of primate,
which had developed a variety of structures and capacities (don't you
dare call them preadaptations) that just happened to be particularly well
suited for these invaders. It is not surprising that the invaders were well
adapted for finding homes in their hosts, since they were themselves created
by their hosts, in much the way spiders create webs and birds create nests. In
a twinkling—less than a hundred thousand years—these new invaders
transformed the apes who were their unwitting hosts into something
altogether new: witting hosts, who, thanks to their huge stock of newfangled
invaders, could imagine the heretofore unimaginable, leaping through Design
Space as nothing had ever done before. Following Dawkins ( 1976), I call the
invaders memes, and the radically new kind of entity created when a
particular sort of animal is properly furnished by—or infested with— memes
is what is commonly called a person.
That is the story in rough outline. Some people, I have found, just hate the
whole idea. They like the idea that it is our human minds and human culture
that distinguish us sharply from all the "thoughtless brutes" (as Descartes
called them ), but they don't like the idea of trying to give an evolutionary
explanation of the creation of this most important distinguishing mark. I
think they are making a big mistake. 2 Do they want a miracle? Do they want
culture to be God-given? A skyhook, not a crane? Why? They want the
human way of life to be radically different from the way of life of all other
living things, and so it is, but, like life itself, and every other wonderful thing,
culture must have a Darwinian origin. It, too, must grow out of something
less, something quasi-, something merely as if rather than intrinsic, and at
every step along the way the results have to be, as David Haig puts it,
evolutionarily enforceable. For culture we need language, for instance, but
language has to evolve on its own hook first; we can't just notice how good it
would be once it was all in place. We can't presuppose cooperation; we can't
presuppose human intelligence; we can't presuppose tradition— this all has to
be built up from scratch, just the way the original replicators were. Settling
for anything less in the way of an explanation would be just giving up.
In the next chapter, I will address the important theoretical questions
2. It has been made before, by no less stalwart a Darwinian than Thomas Henry Huxley,
in his Romanes Lecture of 1893 in Oxford. "Huxley's critics ... noted the apparent
bifurcation he had introduced into nature, between natural processes and human activity,
as if man could somehow lift himself out of nature" (Richards 1987, p. 316). Huxley
quickly saw his error and attempted to restore a Darwinian account of culture—by an
appeal to the force of group selection! History does have a way of repeating itself.